How To Use Cardio-Based Workouts For Fat Loss, Endurance, & Stamina The RIGHT Way | Mind Pump 2375

all right it's summertime lots of people ramp up their workouts right around now of course because they want to look better in the bathing suit now is this the right time to start implementing more cardio should you ramp up your cardio what's cardio good for in today's episode we're going to talk exactly about that coming from Team No Sweat yeah I know let's run you know you first I think it's important we address um what we've talked about many times on the podcast um which is that cardio type workouts now cardio workouts are things like running swimming biking um you could throw circuit training in there um high intensity interval train type stuff those kind of workouts are not effective if they're the primary or sole source of exercise for fat loss um and we've talked about this many times uh on the podcast as to why it doesn't it it tends to cause the body to want to pair muscle down as it improves endurance and become more efficient with calorie burn so uh essentially slows metabolism down and and then studies show for fat loss strength training is just Superior if you were to pick one or the other but however cardio if implemented in short stints yes in four week 6 week 8we periods can accelerate fat loss because right around that time then you start to get maybe that negative adaptation potential but we'll talk about how to offset that as well but in those short periods of time then you can see accelerated cycle it in in short period you do actually acire some really good benefits from it um but yeah it's really about staying ahead of that so um that way uh it doesn't turn into a problematic uh uh situation today's giveaway on YouTube is Maps anabolic Advanced to enter to win leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours we drop it subscribe to this Channel and turn on notifications if you win we'll let you know in the comment section now it's brought to you by a sponsor uh vori vori makes the best ath Leisure wear you'll find anywhere looks good lasts a long time and if you go through our link you get yourself a big discount go to VOR cl.com that's V rico.com pump and that link will get you 20% off also because this episode is all about cardio Maps cardio is going to be 50% off for this episode only if you're interested go to Maps cardio.com and then use the code 50 cardio 50 cardio for that discount all right here comes the show so when I used to coach uh competitors the thing the way I the analogy I would tell them is that it's like a nitric oxide like that's how NOS right that's how we want to use this like I want to dial in every other aspect of the car right the the suspension the steering the tires the horsepower the torque like we want to dial all that in which is our nutrition our sleep our like all the macros like that's we want to dial all that in and then when that is like running sweet we're we're seeing every all the response we want then in those final weeks when it when it comes down to that clut nit then we hit the nitrous then we use we use that we do not want to come out the gates hitting the nitrous before we fine-tune everything else that's how I used to explain it to that but the the the the the real good pure fat burning effects uh minus the potential negatives for muscle happen in like that that the short stance when you go beyond that is when you start to kind of see negatives but of course you also want to combine it um with good strength training so cardio can be used as a tool to kind of turbocharge fat loss if you do it the right way now cardio is uh when it comes to all forms of exercise the best for other things one of them being endurance like if you want endurance and stamina yeah that's the best way to do it now you can lift weights for endurance and stamina you can do other forms of exercise for endurance stamina but for for Pure cardiovascular endurance it's it's the best um and so uh there's a lot of value there it's also valuable for health um all forms of exercise are valuable for health cardio included so you know those are other reasons good reasons why you should Implement cardio well this is important to talk about because this is where the misconception around uh our points on cardio right are at like if it's if it's for fat loss you'd heard us say uh anti- cardio a lot right that's been a lot of the conversation that's come out of here if I had a client that that was their specific goal it doesn't matter whether I would use it the last four weeks or not the the point that I try to get across to that client was that that's not the go-to move for us to go towards cardio different scenario the small percentage of people that come to me and say like hey I want to be overall healthy or I want to build endurance like if you say things like to that to me as a client and your your primary goal isn't fat loss then it's a no-brainer that we're incorporating cardio training within our within our training routine because endurance most certainly cardio is the best tool for building endurance and overall health is that has some sort of incorporation of cardio in there also it's definitely a piece of the the formula for that yeah I also like it too uh I mean not especially for athletes but also just like your everyday average like weightlifter uh it's going to cross over and benefit in terms of like the endurance and stamina while you're getting through your sets uh and so just cycling that in like every so often like you know once twice a year where you do a good few weeks of like really focused dialed in cardiovascular training is going to really help uh you know carry you through some of those like grueling workouts as yeah totally and uh again when it comes to Fat Loss if we're talking about short stints like I said four weeks six weeks with other uh aspects being controlled and done properly then what it will do and what it can do is take fat loss and just make it happen a bit faster it's like a Turbocharger like Adam said with competitors I'm pretty sure you didn't incorporate cardio we didn't ramp it up until the first the final you know four weeks or five weeks or sometimes even less that's right because you would see that accelerated fat loss beyond that you start to see that kind of adaptation I think the first point around cardio though needs to be made which is this is true for all forms of exercise including and especially strength training which is need you need to do the appropriate amount people overdo exercise across the board um they think if some is good more is better and cardio tends to be the one that gets abused the most uh in this category and I think it's because you can abuse it uh more often and not necessarily feel is beat up like uh you know it's you'd be hard pressed to find somebody abuse strength training in the same way where they're going to be in the gym I mean there there are people that do it but in my experience uh you know overdoing cardio tends to be more common although overdoing exercise in general is common and it's more detrimental than if compared to strength training like if you both are abused I think that both strength training and cardio are are abused in the fitness Community the idea of more is better is is a constant conversation that I think that we're always having the difference though of abusing cardio versus abusing res resistance training normally if you abuse risk resistance training it causes a a hard Plateau you don't see a lot of results abusing cardio will actually put you in the opposite direction of your goal a lot of times like if your goal lose muscle yeah if your goal is to reduce body fat and you just do tons and tons of cardio what you see sometimes with clients is actual body fat percentage go up even though their scale went down and so they think oh I'm doing the right thing so they continue on this hamster wheel but but then it ends up even hurting them more because they end up pairing down so much muscle I want to I want to explain that cuz someone might have heard that and said what they lost weight but their body they they gain body fat how's that possible if you keep the same amount of body fat on your body but you lose muscle your body fat percentage went up yeah or if you lose the same and you got smaller your percentage right so so body fat it's all about body fat percentage okay so 20 lbs of body fat on a 200 lb man is lean that's 10% body body fat 20 lbs of body fat on a 100 lb man is fat 20 now it's 20% now you're now your body fat percentage is quite high so it's really about percentage that's the important thing to consider here and overdoing cardio it it gets your muscles your body wants to pair down muscle uh when you overdo it um and so it needs to be appropriate you need to feel better at the end of your cardio session than you did getting started you should feel invigorated it's okay to feel like you worked out I don't mean like you feel Rel but when you hop off the treadmill or you done you shouldn't feel like you're just you just survived you should feel pretty damn good it's okay to be tired because you just exerted yourself but you should also feel really good um it should not impede or crowd out uh strength training if fat loss is your goal if endurance is your goal that's perfectly fine strength training then becomes more of a supportive role um and it definitely shouldn't Crow out things like sleep and you definitely shouldn't try to replace a poor diet uh with cardio but it needs to be appropriate and I think the way the best way to kind of Encompass that is you need to be able to do enough C the the the right amount of cardio for your body for your Fitness level for the context of your life so if you have are doing no cardio and you don't work out and you're listening to this you know uh two 10minute walks a day is going to be great if you're listening to this and you do cardio all the time you got great endurance and stamina what's going to be very different for you or if you're listening to this and you have poor sleep and a lot of stress you just had a baby or you know whatever you know too much card is going to stress your body and you're not going to be able to recover very well from it it's just going to put your body in a really really high um you know position of stress so you have to pick the appropriate amount of cardio now in my experience cardio you know shorter bouts frequently tend to do better for most people versus the long bouts done infrequently so you know instead of doing an hour and a half or an hour or two days a week you know 20 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day seem to work better for a lot of people I work with now is that what does that have to do with like uh our bodies Energy Systems right like I remember reading that if you were to do intense cardio for longer than an hour it's like the body shifts over into like this yeah so what's you know what's funny about that so they've done studies on that and it's like okay it takes this long to burn up your glycogen then you start to tap into fat but if your calorie intake is higher than your calorie burn it doesn't matter doesn't matter that you're you know that you fasted and now you're in ketosis even if if your calories too high you're going to gain body fat if they're below what you're burning then hopefully you lose body fat so really it's just about uh frequent shorter bouts of cardio tend to be easier to be consistent easier to schedule they tend to not beat up the body as much you know if you watch the way somebody uses a StairMaster or a treadmill past the point of fatigue their form starts to get real sloppy and crappy so injury risk kind of goes up um it's easy to recover from it feels more recuperative so uh it just in my experience it seems to be better to do a little bit daily versus a lot well that's a really good point to make too s like understanding too the mechanics of the cardio that you choose to do too I think is so important like you know you might typically tell someone to go for a light jogger run but if that person has really poor running mechanics we might be better off going for a swim or doing the elliptical or choosing a piece of cardio equipment that is more conducive for their mechanics versus you have somebody and and a lot of people make this mistake of thinking that just cuz they can't go run that they're doing a good job and they're not making things worse it's like just because you can pump your arms and move your legs a little faster than a walk doesn't necessarily mean that you're helping yourself think of the everybody you ever see running when you're going for a walker outside easily 95% of them have terrible running mechanics most people shouldn't run for cardio because they don't know how to run properly because they stopped running when they were kids it's a skill at the end of the day I mean if you look at it you do see it's rare to see good mechanics it's rare to see somebody with good form and they've actually been coached uh as to how to run and and how to do that appropriately and it's it's definitely something that you can invest in a coach and get somebody to help you if that's like your thing if you want to be a runner you should really go get a coach to help you yeah so if you're getting started and you don't you haven't run for years and you're not like an athlete in that sense I don't think you should choose running as as your former cardio no there's cardio machines that make it that are less technical I think is the right way to right running is very technical it's a skill that once you lose you got to rebuild it and relearn it that could take a while there's lower impact options you can go on a stationary bike stationary bike uh elliptical elliptical I mean uh you walking I love walking I think that's another great uh and so yeah when it comes to appropriate cardio it's like yeah pick the one that you feel like you can still move well within that you don't start to feel your knees and your joints uh start to bother you the irony of that is I feel like a lot of people choose what is hardest thinking that that's what best for them it's like being the wor yeah this is the most difficult for me to do therefore I think this is burnout is like immediate yeah and the truth is it's it's more often than not the opposite of that it's like it's the one that is that you can be more consistent that isn't putting all kinds of uh pressure on your joints or causing any sort of other issues while you're doing it that's probably the better form of cardio to choose totally uh now another point is uh to kind of go over the different General categories of cardio on the one hand you have the the most commonly done form of cardio which is steady state so this would be you're on a bike and you're going the same speed for 30 minutes or 40 minutes or you're going for a walk it's the same speed or you're jogging it's the same speed or buy or whatever right steady state meaning it's steady it's steady consistent and it's about just how long you could do it for or you're doing it for x amount of time now would you guys when you so when I would uh explain this to a client um I used to use the talk test to teach them like how how do I measure how hard I'm going on how do I know I'm not pushing too hard or I'm not I say you want to push yourself hard but to a point where you can still hold a conversation while you're doing it yeah if you can't talk yeah if you're running so hard or you're doing the elliptical so hard that I can't have a conversation with the person next to me that means I need to scale back so that would be how I and I know some people are familiar with heart rates and zones and and and breathing patterns but when you really start focusing on those things it's such a distraction and a lot of times it like ruins the rhythm of what you're doing uh and interrupts a lot of the process I think that's the most simple way to evaluate uh you know how intense you're going is is the talk test totally um and then the other General uh category of cardio is high intensity interval training these this is cardio that's characterized by uh like Sprints of exertion followed by really low intensity movement or rest um so it would be like the diff steady state on a treadmill would look like a slow jog for 20 minutes or 30 minutes high-intensity interval training would look like a Sprint for 15 seconds and then a and then a walk for 30 seconds to catch your breath and then a Sprint and then a walk again high-intensity interval training you burn the same calories of steady state in a shorter period of time so in terms of calorie efficiency you can do less and burn more calories uh than you can for the same in that same yeah um so it's it's efficient now the downside of it it's more intense it is way harder if you're if if you're somebody that can hurt yourself easily on steady State you're going to hurt yourself for sure right on high intensity it's also requires a greater ability to recover in my experience if somebody is high stress and they haven't you know they're just getting into working out or they already work out a lot and they want to add exerc more exercise they don't want to overtrain uh hit style training high-intensity interval training it just it it it hammers the recovery system way more R steady state can actually be quite recuperative uh in comparison yeah I would just say like a prerequisites out there if you have any kind of joint uh restrictions or like pains or like it's probably the form of cardio I would avoid for most people but in terms of like if your body's able to to handle that kind of stress very effective very uh efficient uh form of doing cardio and you get it done in that nice little window keep in mind too that high intensity is relative to your current level too so the mistake that like and this is where I used to see stuff like this I get clients that would come and be like hey I got this hit protocol and it says I supposed to go speed whatever for this much time it's just like well that's a really generic formula depending on where your your cardio level is at right now would dictate how I would tell you to push so again this is one of those things where it's like you know you go as hard as you can for 15 to 20 second you know all out when you're all out might be a super hard power walk that's I was just going to say so I use the example of a Sprint I hit cardio for some of my clients was an uphill power walk power walk yeah just a quick little steep as you could go power walk and then coming right back down and so it's important that they understand that it's like you are pushing just your max exertion for a very short period of time and then bringing it all the way down to like a slow movement or no movement to gather heart rate and that's the idea is to let the you want the heart rate to come all the way back down to almost to where not quite resting you're not going to get resting at that at that State but your your normal heart rate right throughout the day that's what you want to come back down to now now the next point in this I we love making this point with strength training we love making this point with Mobility with any form of exercise which is watch your performance uh now there's other things to measure too like fat loss and stuff like that but when your performance is improving it means you're probably doing a lot of things right when your performance is decreasing or declining uh many times it means something's off either you're you're training too hard too often you're not getting enough sleep something's off with the nutrition now I do understand that fat loss being a calorie deficit can cause a reduction uh in performance um so it's not a perfect measure but if your performance is improving especially if you've cut your calories and your performance is proving man you are doing great so I like to tell people to pay attention to their performance with their cardio last time you did 30 minutes this time you did 30 minutes same speed did it feel different oh yeah like my perceived exertion this time like last time it was kind of hard this time it felt a lot of easier or I did hit you know I I would do a 15sec Sprint with 30 seconds of of cruising now I only have to cruise for 20 seconds like you if you see your performance improving then you're probably doing a lot of things right so I like to tell people to focus on that plus the mirror and especially the scale can lie uh if you're watching your weight go down like the example we Adam gave earlier you might lose weight but go up in body fat percentage and a lot of people don't realize that they'll stand on the scale see they lost weight and they're celebrating but they don't realize that they're flaber because they're lying to themselves because the scale uh went down you know because we talked earlier about how this is abused uh so much and and even more detrimental than resistance training you know when I would move clients up like when we're trying to push the performance in in the cardio world it's very incremental yeah like I would it would be a like a adding 15 seconds or you know Point 2 on the speed like it does not each time what's really neat about cardiovascular training is almost every single workout you can see like an improvement and there's no need for you to go from you know you pushing like let's say five speed five is really hard for you then the next time you come to the gym you get to push speed six or seven it's like no you just make a goal for yourself to incrementally really small amounts or shaving time off by a couple seconds each time and after a month or two months of training this way you'd be surprised how F how much you've shaved off or how much that you've in uh improved your performance just by doing these real Su incremental changes or increases the intensity yeah um now next up is to always incorporate strength training now fat loss is your goal strength and that's your ultimate goal strength training should be the Cornerstone of your routine you shouldn't be doing more cardio than strength training now if endurance is your goal then it flips now strength training is there as a support but the reason why strength training should always be there is because it benefits all other forms of exercise because strength is the foundation for all physical Pursuits and it'll also prevent injury if you do it properly prevents injury improves mobility and it maintains and strengthens performance in almost every if I can I mean every physical percent and maintains lean body mass during this time that's it 100% so always strength train now again if endurance is your goal you're an endurance athlete you might only strength train once a week if fat loss is your goal and you don't care so much about endurance as much as you just I like it then strength training should be uh more frequent than that and an example that s would be if uh we had a client who hired us that is training for an OCR race or a Marathon or yeah or Triathlon has very specific endurance some people will say things like well I want more endurance well what they mean is they want more stamina during the day exactly so that's important to note that is like if you're you still are going to have strength training as a Cornerstone even if you quote unquote want more endurance the only time where strength training I would limit someone all the way down to just one time per week and then the rest of it is endurance training is if we have a very specific thing that goal in mind like we're trying to do a marathon triathlete whatever something like that if you're just trying to improve endurance well you still are going to have strength training as a Cornerstone because not only can we intermittently do these bouts of cardio but we could also do things within the training program too that's going to help build the endurance also totally and finally uh this is especially true for fat loss mainly for fat loss although it affects everything it's diet diet is Paramount okay so uh you know and I'm sure a lot of people have heard this before but you know I'll mention this because it's it just really illustrates it like it's really hard to burn calories it's really hard to burn it takes work it takes a lot of work to burn calories and yes you can speed up your metabolism and that's a great way to do so because then you don't have to do the work your metabolism does it for you 100% true that's what we talk about all the time on our show but nonetheless even that is very hard in comparison to eating calories eating calories is easy it's it's it's figuratively and literally a piece of cake like if you ate uh you know a couple slices of pizza and had 600 calories it would take you to hours or three hours maybe of exercise of cardio to burn off those uh those calories although I know cardio machines lie they say you burn 800 calories doing 30 minutes that's not true it's a lot less it's a lot of work right one soda like how how much you know that's 20 minutes or 30 minutes on on a piece of cardio equipment so your diet has to be really really good or at least uh put you in a deficit with adequate protein if you're trying to get leaner and you and don't try to create the fat loss with exercise alone it's really tough to do and the opposite is true if you are using this primarily for endurance yes so if you're somebody who is trying to you know again triathlete or someone like running for OCR something like that and you are running a program like this to improve your endurance then staying fed becomes really important fat losses not are important we're not trying to be catabolic at all you need to be fed so you want to be fed and I see that I see this as a mistake a lot of times with those types of athletes is they're dieting to you know get lean or get in shape but then they're also trying to improve performance and that's conflicting right there it's like you want to fuel if you're really doing if you're chasing the cardio for endurance and performance like out out on a triath impede on that performance 100% you got to make sure that you're getting adequate calories adequate protein enough fuel for that body to perform at a higher level and to continue to perform better the opposite is true if you were trying to use it as a way to reduce body fat but equally important to make sure that you're hitting your protein intake because one of the things that you see people do in pursuit of you know fat loss is they just cut calories and they don't realize that they also dramatically reduce their already low protein intake and now that are even even lower protein intake and they're sending a this catabolic signal and so yeah the body not only loses weight it loses uh muscle along the way too and endurance athletes you know they're not making this mistake as much but you still see this this this was very common uh you know just 15 years ago and you still see it now which is you know athletes know that carbohydrates are the primary source of energy but then so when you look at their diet it's a lot of carbohydrates which is okay but they don't eat adequate protein protein is is just as important for the endurance athlete as it is for the strength training athlete they need to eat adequate protein to repair their body CU all exercise causes damage and I'm not talking about the minimum don't eat the minimum now you might not need to go one gram per pound of body weight like somebody wants to build muscle but it's got to be up there um otherwise you're going to notice decrease in performance in fact that was my go too with my my my well seasoned endurance endurance athletes that would hire me who had already done 10 marathons or had done two triathlons or a half half Iron Man when they would come to me i' look at their diet I would increase their protein intake and they'd be blown away what do you mean more protein shouldn't I be eating more start your carbohydrates or whatever it's like no the protein but diet is going to be Paramount especially for fat loss because if you're trying to create that calorie deficit right if you're trying to create a situation where the fat loss happens because solely because of the exercise it's going to be a very slow almost impossible process put yourself in the deficit with the diet and then complement it with the workouts and again cardio within those short periods of time is a great way uh to help do that now because we're doing this episode we have a program called Maps cardio it is a strength training cardio based workout program the only cardio-based workout program that we really have that specifically that's why it's named this it's great for endurance great for stamina uh it's a great fat loss program and it also has great strength training in it um you're doing in fact you're doing some form of strength training three days a week one day a week is traditional strength training in the program because of this episode it's 50% off so if you're interested in this uh go to u m uh Maps cardio.com and then use the code what is that 50 cardio 50 cardio will give you 50% off Maps cardio now you can also find all of us on social media Justin is on Instagram at M pump Justin I'm on Instagram at M pump Toano and Adam is on Instagram at M pump Adam [Music]